Home Office wages war on child abuse with new project

The Home Office has begun work on the UK’s national Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) that aims to enable law enforcement to better tackle the crime.

In July 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron promised to deliver a central repository for consolidating data in cases of child abuse material and CAID is an attempt to deliver this.

The Department hopes to enable crime units to share data, information and leads to better help them protect children from exploitation.

The news follow’s last week’s report that Police in the country do not have the necessary digital forensics skills available to analyse such data and expert opinions that better collaboration would improve the situation.

The suppliers chosen to aid the Home Office in delivered CAID are intelligence solutions providers NetClean, Hubstream and systems solution company L-3 ASA.

Contracts Awarded Via G-Cloud

In a two-year £720,000 contract awarded via the G-Cloud framework, the latter will provide project and service management for the advanced system that uses unique identifiers and metadata to identify and classify images and video.

NetClean claims to be responsible for deploying its Analyse Collaboration Server to act as a central hub where files are stored and extracted for new investigations.

The providers involved expect CAID to save an estimated £6 million per year by speeding up Police processes and allowing crime fighting agencies to searched content on seized devices, as well as giving them the ability to differentiate between new and existing material.

Such features mean Police can focus their resources accordingly and NetClean claims it will be delivering a client server solution for streamlining the collection, analysis, correlation and deconfliction of child abuse material.

“Joined-Up Approach” To Have “Significant Benefits”

“The joined-up investigative approach that the CAID enables will have a significant impact on how UK law enforcement tackles sexual crimes against children and put the UK at the forefront of how to investigate this crime,” claimed the firm’s product manager Johann Hofmann.

“The CAID is a promising step in the intelligent analysis of digital media and Big Data, as the more data the system holds, the better insight it provides,” he added.